Nick Cave

Nick Cave was born in Warracknabeal in 1957, grew up in rural Victoria and studied art in Melbourne before fronting the Birthday Party, one of that city's fiercest post-punk bands, in the late '70s. They decamped to London in 1980, soured on the place, and got darker and nastier in response, a racket that helped light the fuse for gothic rock and gave them a name as maybe the most violent live band anywhere. Cave was the gaunt, black-haired eye of the storm. The band fell apart soon after moving to West Berlin in 1982, and the following year he formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

The early Bad Seeds records haunt a mythic American Deep South, soaked in spirituals and Delta blues, and his Old Testament fixation on good and evil peaked with "The Mercy Seat" in 1988, the same period that produced his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel. In the '90s the New Testament crept in, and so did quieter, piano-led ballads that found a mainstream audience: "Where the Wild Roses Grow", his duet with Kylie Minogue, and "Into My Arms".

Since then he has scored films with Warren Ellis, from The Proposition to The Road, kicked up garage-rock dust with Grinderman, and let grief over his son Arthur's death in 2015 seep into more abstract, ambient-tinged work, most nakedly on Ghosteen. Wild God, the Bad Seeds' 18th album, arrived in 2024. The ARIA Hall of Fame took him in in 2007, and in 2017 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia.

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